Jose Gaitan stands with the Delaware County Honor Guard before a service. The Delaware County Honor Guard performed 18 services for deceased veterans as of Feb. 2. / Patti Blake/ The Star Press

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MUNCIE — The vagaries of Indiana weather notwithstanding, José Gaitan is a man used to being exposed to the elements.

After all, the first time the San Antonio, Texas, native came to Muncie back in 1964, it was as a migrant worker at a farm near here.

“We helped plant and we helped harvest,” he recalled reflectively, seated at a table inside American Legion Post 19, the green bandana around his forehead helping hold his long gray hair in place in a ponytail. “It’s hard work, but it can be fun.”

His first venture here came to an end in 1966, with a call to his mother back in Texas.

“She told me I had a letter waiting, beginning with the word, ‘Greetings.’” he said, smiling slightly at the memory.

It was, of course, Gaitan’s Army draft notice.

At that time, the fighting in Vietnam was reaching a fevered pitch, with hundreds of Americans killed in combat each week, but he ended up stationed in Germany, “pole climbing” as he called it, as a member of the 32nd Signal Battalion. Even there, though, the emotional cost of the war in Southeast Asia was raw.

“I lost a lot of good friends in Vietnam,” he said.

Patriotic all his life, Gaitan nevertheless was also angered to encounter discrimination when he returned to Muncie in 1968, his Native American heritage visible in his features.

“I had my share of discrimination,” he said.

Why?

“Because it was me,” he continued, noting that an effort to join the Eagles was thwarted by what was then its “no blacks, orientals or otherwise” policy, something that particularly rankled him as a veteran.

“I was ‘otherwise,’” he explained.

That was long ago, though, Gaitan having spent more than 33 years working here between time spent at Broderick and doing general labor with Laborers Union 1112.

But that sort of work and his earlier field work, not to mention his Army service scooting up utility poles, undoubtedly hardened him for what now totals 24 years spent as a member of the Delaware County Honor Guard, which provides military rites to the burials of local veterans.

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Last year, Gaitan and fellow members of the Honor Guard served at 199 burials. With them firing their M1 rifles in salute to the departed at each one, that’s a lot of .30 caliber blanks. Delivered to them two boxes at a time, with 2,500 round each, those blanks don’t necessarily get the men through a year’s worth of services.

“I participated in probably 90 percent,” he noted of those services, checking his cell phone’s calendar to find it already booked with several more set for coming days.

All this is, to be sure, a real commitment on their part, requiring the Honor Guard members to gather for the funeral service and then at the grave site for the burial afterward.

Weather, as already noted, is simply something to be endured.

“We’ve done it in the rain,” Gaitan said. “In the cold. In the heat. We’ve stood out there when it’s 8 below.”

The memory of a funeral service for a fellow Honor Guard member brought him a laugh, that man having expressed the hope that the weather at his own service would be exceedingly miserable. What’s more, that man got his wish, much to to his former colleagues’ chagrin.

The payoff from this service comes in knowing they have honored a fellow veteran, and helped that veteran’s family.

“They appreciate it,” Gaitan said, of the survivors.

Sometimes, he continued, family members or others will see the Honor Guard having lunch at Bruner’s Family Restaurant or Sirloin Stockade, and pick up their tab.

In a way, though, the members of the Honor Guard also do this for themselves.

“It’s an honor, actually, for me to do it for a fellow veteran,” said Gaitan, the room’s overhead lights reflecting dully off the Saint Christopher’s medal hanging from a chain around his neck. “Maybe when my time comes, they’ll do it for me. I hope they have to wait a long time, though.”

That he’ll eventually have the same military honors as the others seems assured. Besides his work with the Honor Guard, he is commander of Post 19, the 10th district vice commander, chairman of POW-MIA issues for the post and district, and more.

That level of service means something, but so does withstanding the rigors of the Honor Guard as they go about their duty. Gaitan, after all, is 71 years old, and the other members are people with adult medical histories.

His, by the way, includes two strokes, two heart stints, bad knees and a couple of encounters with Bell’s palsy.

Still, he can’t see himself retiring from the Honor Guard soon.

“I’ll do it as long as I can,” Gaitan said with a nod. “Even now, when you sound ‘Taps,’ I still get a tear in my eye.”